


and if I don't make it know

by therealw



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Citizen Kane references, Drunk Dialing, Film References, M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Post-Movie, deposition-era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-25
Updated: 2016-02-25
Packaged: 2018-05-23 05:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6106899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therealw/pseuds/therealw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Mark drunk dialed Eduardo (and one call he made while sober).</p>
            </blockquote>





	and if I don't make it know

**Author's Note:**

> Title from '4AM' by Our Lady Peace.

**one.**

 

“Are you gonna tell them?”

“Wh— _Mark_?” Eduardo asks drowsily. He glances at the alarm clock on the bedside table. Great. He’d finally fallen into a restless sleep a couple of hours ago.

“Are you gonna tell them,” Mark insists, and Eduardo knows, _knows_ Mark is drunk, from that tone of voice alone.

“Tell them?”

“About us.”

Eduardo could pretend he doesn’t know what Mark is talking about, but it’s the middle of the night, and he should be resting for the first day of depositions tomorrow and simply can’t be bothered. “Have you?”

“No. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“Gretchen kind of suggested it…” He sighs. “Or… well, I think she was trying to find out without being offensive, but to be honest I’m too terrified of her to ask.”

“You’re scared of your own lawyers?”

Eduardo huffs a tired laugh. “Wait until you meet her tomorrow.” A beat. “So that’s what you needed to know at, ah,” he glances at the clock again, “four fifteen in the morning?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. I just wanted to talk to you. I don’t think we’re allowed to talk during the depositions.”

“And here I was thinking depositions were all about talking.”

“I meant to _each other_.”

“This fucking lawsuit is proof of how much we suck at that, Mark.”

“We’re talking now.”

“You’re drunk and I’m half-asleep, it’s like the Paralympics of conversation.”

Mark snorts.

“Drink some water and go to sleep, Mark. It’s gonna be a long day tomorrow.”

 

**two.**

 

“Were you carrying an umbrella with you today?”

“What?”

“Well, it was raining, and I know it wasn’t raining when you left the deposition but then it started to rain and I was still there and I’d sort of lost the sense of time, but maybe it caught you out in the street. Or something.”

“I was in my hotel when it started raining.” It’s a half-lie. He can’t tell Mark that he’d walked out onto the balcony of his room and stood in the rain, staring at the vast expanse of the Common, until the clatter of his teeth became louder than his thoughts.

“Do you still do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make notes about weather patterns,” Mark answers impatiently, as if his meaning should be obvious. “On paper napkins.”

“What?”

“I found one in my pocket once. I’d no idea how it got there. But I couldn’t throw it away, I just… then one day I went to look for it but Dustin must’ve thrown that sweatshirt in the wash and it was gone, just these tiny white shreds, like dried petals, and I… oh, and empty pizza boxes. You sometimes scribbled on the side of empty pizza boxes. I remember that.”

“What does that have to do with anything, Mark?”

“Well, you could always predict the weather and it was raining that night.”

Eduardo doesn’t ask him to specify which night he means. “We’re not supposed to discuss this. Gretchen will kill me. And you. If Sy doesn’t beat her to it.”

“We can’t talk about the weather in Palo Alto three years ago? I thought the weather was a safe topic all around.”

“Don’t do this, Mark.”

“You were drenched.”

“ _Mark_.”

“Isn’t that weird? You used to check the weather forecast obsessively. You must’ve known it was going to pour down that night. Maybe… _oh_. You expected me to pick you up.”

“I really don’t want to talk about that, Mark.”

“It’s funny, though. I’ve thought about that night. A lot. And I thought, maybe if I’d been waiting for you at the airport, if we’d talked then, without Sean, without… but I’d never thought about the rain. Until today.”

Eduardo sighs. “What does it matter now, anyway.”

“I don’t know. We’re like race horses now, blinkers on and blind to everything except the goal. Gotta keep your eyes on the prize, Wardo.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I’d forgotten about the rain.”

“You’ve said that already.”

“It’s weird.”

“No, it isn’t. You tend to forget everything you don’t think deserves your attention, Mark. I should know.”

“Don’t… you weren’t paying attention, in that hallway.”

“You mean when you said I was about to be left behind? Oh, I think I heard just fine, Mark.”

“No. _No_. The _other_ thing. I told you I needed you and you didn’t even listen, Wardo.”

“You didn’t need me, Mark. You had long stopped needing me at that point.” A rattling sigh. “Look… I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

And he hangs up.

 

**three.**

 

“How did you get this number?”

Mark snorts. “Don’t insult me.”

“What do you want, Mark?”

“We hit fifty million members today.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I keep up with Facebook happenings, probably because I’m a masochist.”

“Really? I thought we’d established you were a sadist who got off on torturing animals.”

“Hilarious. Truly.”

“I think about the chicken, sometimes.”

“ _Mark_.”

“No, no, I mean the _actual chicken_. They should’ve deposed it. It was there for a whole week. Probably had a few choice things to say about us.”

“I bet it did.”

“An impartial observer.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t plant the story, by the way.”

“Mark, it really doesn’t—”

“But I was glad someone did,” Mark continues as if Eduardo hadn’t spoken. “I thought… I thought it’d make you see how stupid the whole Phoenix business was, that you were already in a better club than any of the Finals could ever hope to be, and then you’d ditch them and come with me to California. I didn’t feed the story to the Crimson. And I didn’t want Sy to use it, tried to stop him when he brought it up, actually.” A pause. “But I _did_ make the call.”

“The call?”

“The police. I did call the police. I just miscalculated how— _fuck_. I shouldn’t have told you that. Fuck. I really shouldn’t have told you that.”

Before Eduardo can formulate a response, he hears the shrill tone of a disconnected call.

 

 

**four.**

 

When the phone rings at three in the morning Eduardo doesn’t even question who it’s going to be. There’s a fucked-up moral in this but it’s three in the fucking morning and Eduardo was never very good at learning his lessons as far as Mark Zuckerberg is concerned.

"I was there tonight."

"Wh—"

"I saw you at the party. And I know you saw me.”

Euardo sighs. “Yeah.”

“Yeah. And later, I was in the middle of fucking this pretty, unsuspecting, _irrelevant_ girl, and all I could think of was… do you remember that time with Christy and her friend in that club? Before I ran into Erica?”

“What does that—”

“It was the same feeling, Wardo. The same thing. And it’s even weirder when you’re not in the next stall. Does it happen to you too?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Because it does. To me. All the time. And it sucks, you know? It sucks. A lot.”

“Mark.”

“Do they remind you of me at all? Because sometimes mine do. And that makes it even worse, somehow.”

The worst part is, Eduardo actually does have more than a vague idea of what Mark’s trying to get at. And he really, really doesn’t want to listen to this.

“It’s still weird, these girls that come up to me. I don’t even know what they expect. They can’t possibly think I’m gonna marry someone who only deigns to give me the time of day because they know who I am… doesn’t mean I won’t fuck them. If they offer. Which they tend to do.”

“Mark, I really don’t wan—”

“And they don’t mean anything,” Mark talks over him, undeterred. “ _Anything_. I’ve forgotten what it feels like, when it does. Maybe it’s better this way. It never ends well when it means… too much. I wonder if it’s possible to find someone who means just enough. Less risky. But that doesn’t make for very marketable Valentine cards, does it? ‘ _You mean just enough to me_ ’. I bet any girl would love that.”

“People don’t remember the one who meant just enough, Mark,” Eduardo says, surprising himself. He didn’t mean to indulge Mark. Or encourage him.

Mark snorts. “You sure? No poems in that Lit class you took called ‘ _Ode to the One Who Meant Just Enough_ ’ by Rilke?”

Eduardo smiles despite himself. “Surprising, right? You’d think adequately average feelings would make for epic poems.”

Mark lets out a tired laugh and sighs. “Fuck. I’ve become a maudlin drunk.”

“I noticed.”

“You were the one to get all nostalgic and shit when you drank.”

“Sometimes I still do. If it makes you feel any better.”

“It doesn’t. But at least I don’t end up crying, like Dustin.”

“He still does that?”

“Jesus, yes. It’s undignified.”

“Because dignified is an adjective you usually associate with him while sober.”

“Point.”

A long silence follows and Eduardo wonders whether Mark has passed out.

“You know,” Mark says, startling him a little. “The next time… maybe the next time we could _not_ avoid each other and toast to adequately average feelings.”

“I’d like that.” 

They both know they won’t, but the idea is enough to ignite something warm inside Eduardo's chest for a moment.

 

 

**five.**

 

"They got it all wrong, Wardo."

"It's the middle of the fucking night here, Mark."

"I know."

"Are you drunk?"

"Of course I'm drunk, why else would I be calling you? No, wait, there was another... ah. Yes. The movie! The movie they made about us!"

"It was more about you, really."

"Either way, they're wrong."

"Yeah, I know."

"They think Erica's Rosebud!”

“Rosebud?”

“I know, right? That's so... that's bullshit. She isn't, Wardo, she never was."

"Okay."

"If there was one fucking sled, it was you, okay? _You_. You were the sled."

And with that, he hangs up. Eduardo stares at the ceiling. There's no way he can go back to sleep now. He fumbles for the remote and flicks through the channels until he settles on one that only shows black-and-white classics. He spends the rest of the night between sleep and wakefulness, the TV always in the background, and when his alarm starts beeping the next morning, he gets out of bed with the lead-heavy feeling in his stomach that he's forgotten something important.

 

**\+ one call he made while sober**

 

“Hey.”

“Mark?”

“Yeah.”

Eduardo checks his watch. “It’s barely eleven in Palo Alto.” 

“Yeah.”

“You’re drunk before noon?”

“I’m not drunk.”

“You’re calling me.”

“There’s no direct link between those two things.”

“Empirical evidence suggests the opposite.”

“Yeah, okay. But I’m not drunk, and I _am_ calling you.”

A too-long pause.

“Wardo?”

“I just don’t know what to say. This is usually the part where you start rambling to prove a point that makes sense only to you.”

“I’d like to talk to you in person.”

“Why.”

“There are… things. Things I need to say. And I think you need to hear them, too.”

“So talk.”

“I’d like to see your face as we talk.”

“That’s… not very you.”

“I’m aware of that. I’m also aware that some of the things I have to say aren’t gonna sound very in character, either. Just so you know in advance.”

Eduardo sighs. “Fine. When do y—”

“Can you call the front desk so they let me up?”

“Wh— you’re _here_?”

“I said in person.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know you meant _right now_!”

“Is this a bad time?”

“It’s not that, it’s—” He sighs again. “Fine. Come up. They’ll be expecting you.”

It seems to take an eternity for Mark to get to his office. Eduardo desperately wants to pace, smash his phone, do something, but he refuses to let his turmoil show.

He’s staring unseeingly out the floor-to-ceiling windows when he hears his secretary cough politely. Eduardo takes a deep breath and turns around. Mark is wearing jeans and a hoodie, disconcerting Eduardo for a moment. In the last few years he has become used to running into Mark when they're both in suits, but in these clothes Mark looks… different from the boy Eduardo remembers wearing them. Older. Calmer. It’s not a word he ever thought he’d use in relation to Mark.

“Hi, Mark.” Eduardo's secretary takes that as her cue to leave, closing the door behind her.

“Wardo. I had a panic attack.”

“What, right now?”

“Right n— no, of course not, are you crazy? Six months ago. It had never happened before. Dustin… Dustin suggested I saw someone. For the stress.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Obviously I said no, but then I had a relapse and… long story short, I saw a therapist for a while.”

“Oh.”

“We… worked some things out.”

“ _Okay_. Is this like AA, do you have a list of all the people you need to make amends with?”

“No. And if I did, it’d be a pretty short list anyway. Just… just one.”

Eduardo is speechless. He’s pretty sure he’s still in bed, hallucinating. Now that he thinks about it, that sushi he had for dinner might have tasted a little off.

“I’m not sorry about what I did.”

“Wow, that therapist sure did one fine job of teaching you how to make amends.”

“Hear me out. If I had to choose, I’d do the same thing again. That’s not what I’m sorry about.”

“Then what.”

“You. You’re what I regret. Us. Losing what we… had. Could’ve had.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s fine. I didn’t expect you to be still in love with me,” he says matter-of-factly and half-shrugs. Eduardo looks taken aback, but Mark ploughs on. “But I wish we could at least… talk. Once in awhile.”

“You mean besides those lovely alcohol-fuelled four am chats?”

“And eventually, I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“You can’t forgive someone if they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong, Mark. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Everything I said… when I called. It was all true. Even the Rosebud thing.”

Eduardo sighs tiredly. “Mark. Hearst was a psycho, you don’t wanna compare yourself to him. He let his own son be maimed, for fuck’s sake.”

“That was Getty, not Hearst. And it was his grandson. And I’d never let our son be maimed, Wardo, don’t be ridiculous. Besides, I meant Kane, not the real guy.”

“That’s what I’m tr— wait, _our_?”

Mark coughs. “You know what I mean.”

“No, I really don’t.”

Mark huffs indignantly.

“But perhaps… perhaps you could tell me more about your Kane analogy over coffee?”

A slow smile starts pulling at the corners of Mark's mouth. “I’d… yeah. I’d like that.”

 

_end_


End file.
